Why do you think you did so badly in _____ ?

Math. Im horrible at math, only thing holding me back now from my degree.

In middle school i was part of the “first graduating class” of this new school created in New York City. In my 7–8th grade years i had about 5 different math teachers. I blame that!

French, lack of trying actually. And interest. I think it’s a horrible language to learn, so many exceptions. (sorry Gail) I’d rather work on my English. Not that that’s not good, but I like English much, much, much better than French.

@Triiiple: 5 different teachers? wtf..

I was suddenly horrible at math when it got to calculus. And by then I just didn’t care whether I did well in it, I’d had enough math to get me out of it for college. I passed with a C.

Trig. I make A’s until about the third test and then I am lost.

French. There are too many rules, and too many exceptions to those rules. It’s very contextual, and I was lazy so I never read the entire text, only skimmed it. In short, I didn’t put in the effort.

Volleyball in physical education. I could not serve the ball if my life depended on it. My wrists would get swollen and red. I hated it. I tried my best but it just wasn’t for me. I’ll stick with archery.

As for why I failed, I think that I did feel genetically incapable. I felt that way with most team sports. I did excell in individual sports though, such as swimming, running and archery (as mentioned above).

Italian in Junior High School.

By rights I should have done well in that class. I simply do not have a head for language (even computer language – coding – eludes me).

After twenty plus years with my wife and her Italian-speaking family, I still suck.

I never did badly in any class ever. I was always (and still am) an excellent student.

I faced bad teachers, occasional gender discrimination, and a lack of motivation to try, sometimes all at once, but I cared enough about all of my classes to overcome these roadblocks and pull out an A in the end.

Economics: because I spent the entire class flirting with the cute guy sitting next to me.

I always sucked at english. Grammer & mechanics was one of those things I never really caught onto. And to this day I’m still working on it every time I check my daughter’s homework and say “uhh… I… guess? it’s right.”

Lately she’s been rollin’ in with chemistry which I like and was good at, but now I remember none of it and have to look online for how to do all the shit. Depressing.

I did badly in math. In retrospect, I think I needed to approach math from a different direction than it was presented in schools at the time. Every goddamn text started from a foundation of set theory and the commutative law, distributive law, yada yada yada…and proceeded to build a cold logical edifice brick by colorless brick. The whole process seemed so devoid of beauty to me at the time that I simply couldn’t muster the attention to stay involved.

I’ve seen enough since my school days to know that there is beauty in math, which makes me vaguely pissed off at the curricula of the time for not exposing us to that. Math people aren’t always language people though, and I suspect it would take a strong language person to communicate the beauty of math in a way someone like me could get his teeth into it. Instead, math was like chewing on wood; I could do it if I had to, but there was no joy in it.

spelling
because I just get bored looking at all of those words

History.

I am interested in the past now, and wonder what it was like to live in ancient Egypt (for example) and ponder the unsolved mysteries of those ancient civilizations. By forcing us to memorize dates and names, they make it a chore in school.

science…i think because i always wanted to keep asking more and more and more questions and it wasn’t conducive to school education ironically…

Like @girlofscience I have always succeeded in any class I have ever bothered to attend. I did fail my whole 9th grade year because I never attended class, but I made up all my units in time to graduate.

Oh yeah! I also flunked computers. All those frikkin’ 1s and 0s and IF/THENs and GOSUBs back in 1982! Gah!
(actually, I was one of the 2 top students in the class, but I kept signing myself out of school early to goof-off, so I had excessive absences. The other kid went on to work for Microsoft and later started his own company… I’ve lost touch with him since… :-/)

The only class I did “badly” in was French and that was because I stopped caring about it when I started learning Japanese. Other than that I had a canny ability to never fail any class or assignment no matter how much effort I did or did not put into it. I stopped attending my university marketing course 3 classes in and skimmed the textbook once, and still pulled out a B+.

Chemestry. Because if I can’t remember the atomic weight of whatever I am screwed. You can’t solve it. Physics however at least you can show your work and that you understand the theory behind it.

I did really bad in chemistry, but that’s probably because my teacher was the golf coach and he would talk for about 5 minutes, make fun of everyone for another 5 minutes (he called one student “Hemi” because he said he was as annoying as hemorrhoids), then go in the lab and smoke cigarettes for the rest of the period. Yeah…

Driver ed, typing, mechanical drawing. Basically anything involving something other than analytic skills.

I’m with @girlofscience. I was pretty much always an honor student, etc. But I did have my strengths and weaknesses. (I was stronger in music and more creative subjects than things that required more abstract theory and memorization.)

Sometimes it just depends. But after starting college I realized that my…mm, level of awareness wasn’t so high, which can make learning certain things a challenge. I had a teacher who always told her students, “Learn to make connections. Always make connections.” I never knew what that meant until I reached college. Then, I started to see many more relationships between every subject I studied and was able to understand things in a more holistic way.

Of course, it always helps to have a good teacher, but sometimes how well you learn just depends on what level of “awareness” you’re at (I’m not sure how else to describe it). You can be smart but still not have those higher learning & thinking skills that let your mind really start pondering outside of the box and on things as a whole, learning to see things in a practical way, etc.

History.

I was never very good at memorizing things. I prefer to be able to reason things out. It took me a long time for history to make sense in that way. (Way after college). So I always struggled in History, even though they kept changing the curriculum so that I kept taking “American History 1492–1865”.

In college I avoided history like the plague. Then my senior year I was forced to take it, so I figured I’d go for “American History 1492–1865”... I was still totally lost.

On one test we were supposed to memorize 10 events and list them in order. I made an A. The professor sarcastically told me that he’d given me an “A” because he hadn’t specified WHICH order. I got them exactly backwards.

That and my dumbass lab partner was pouring leftover chemicals down the sink and not telling me. Then there was smoke. Then fumes.

I did horribly in advanced math and chemistry because it was much too complicated and I didn’t study enough either. The teachers were good but my capacity for assimilating those subjects was just too much for me to bear.

As far as the teachers telling me to make sure I learned the material well because I’m going to need it some time later in my life? That would be an unequivocal NO on needing it later on somewhere because I have never had to rely on any of it to get by.

I didn’t do too well in the sciences, although biology was fine because it was memorization and recitation. Chemistry and Physics were over my head completely. My chemistry teacher was terrible, but I didn’t try very hard either. I was completely unable to stay awake in that class also, no matter how hard I tried. I stopped doing well in Math when I stopped caring about it, and in 9th grade, my teacher and I butted heads rather frequently, which didn’t motivate me at all. I always did well in History and English though, and once I stopped sleeping through French, I was rather good at reading and writing, and my speaking skills weren’t too horrible (although my grammar could use a lot of work). Mon accent, cependant, est presque parfait. Et c’est tres sexy aussi, je pense!

Algebra. Because I tested into the class early (8th grade – almost 30 years ago!), without ever taking (or even seeing) any pre-Algebra. I am very language oriented, and was completely confused at the idea of math having letters in it. My teacher was the Pom-Poms coach, and spent every class doing Poms related crap. She basically refused to help me. After being a straight A student all the way up ‘til then, I failed the class. I took it again in 10th grade, and got an A.

Everything that relied heavily on numbers. Math, chemistry, physics… Even history a little bit, when it involved memorizing dates instead of knowing about what happened and why. Everyone thought I was just being stubborn and not trying hard enough, but that wasn’t the case. I understood everything in theory. I just couldn’t do it in practice because I actually have dyscalculia (like dyslexia, only with numbers). I had no idea until I was out of school.

You know, it’s fairly common for women to be less likely to take math and science compared men. I think I’m seeing evidence of the same pattern here.

There have been a number of efforts to change this. What interests me is some of the reasons I’m seeing, or that are being suggested. Often women are more interested in language subjects compared to subject that use other kinds of symbols. However, itw as augustlan’s comment that tipped me off. She wrote, “I am very language oriented, and was completely confused at the idea of math having letters in it.”

It makes me wonder if math were presented as a language, would women be more likely to like it? It is a language, but somehow people put it into some other category in their minds. We all have a calculus of personality. It’s how we guess the way other people will respond to various stimuli. However, we are usually not aware of what we are doing. We just do it.

Math is like that. What is my car going to do, if I turn sharply while going really fast? When will the sun come up? How strong is the bite of the bear? How far apart should I plant the corn? When will the fish run? How many people can I feed? When will my menses appear? Why does my cake fall when I take it out of the oven suddenly?

You can’t answer any of these questions without using ideas that appear in math or chemistry, or physics. We intuitively know the answers to many of these questions without being aware our brains are employing math to get the answers.

Math is a language like any other language. It refers to things in the real world, but the way it is often taught, it is hard to see these relationships.

It’s like money. Money is a metaphor for value, but we are so used to it being the thing, that we have forgotten what it stands for. We use money as a proxy measure for value. It doesn’t capture value completely, since it is oriented towards the thingness of stuff we value, and not the relational aspects of value (friendships, social networks, good will, etc). Money, of course, lets us count things in a more convenient way, and that’s why we use it. Underneath it, however, is the real value of the things money represents.

And, as long as I’m on the subject, this is what confuses me about the current crisis. Perhaps I am wrong about the ability of money to measure relationship type things. The things that money measures—houses, buildings, bridges, widgets, etc, are all pretty much the same now as they were before the economic crisis started. The only thing that changed is confidence. That changed because people were allowed to have more value for their houses than the houses actually contained. Now, no one believes that money is a good measure of value. And everyone has retreated into their shells, economically speaking.

We’re all waiting for someone else to take the first step. To say, “Stop, this has gone far enough. Things are not this unvaluable. We’ve gone too far.” While we wait, confidence continues to decline.

Oh well. I’ve gone a bit astray from the point and the topic, but one thing leads to another. I don’t know if this makes sense, or if I’ve explained it clearly or sensibly, but it does represent a lot of the thinking I’ve been doing over the years.

Yes, that rings true. I’m quite comfortable with the kind of intuitive, contextual math you’re talking about. But, just as I love language yet hate grammar, I have little interest in the “grammar” of mathematics even though I appreciate the language. Math as it was presented to me in the 60s and 70s seemed to be all about mechanically rearranging symbols according to rules.

Algebra was fun. Geometry was fun. I don’t believe I was taught higher-level maths in a way that engaged me or was made relevant to any aspect of my life. My HS trig and calculus teacher was otherwise the coach for the varsity football team, and he couldn’t’ve cared less if anyone got past a C. He muttered and mumbled throughout every lesson. And we couldn’t get rid of him because his teams won games :/

One of my friends right now is a doctoral candidate in mathematics, and she’s got a way of breaking down the most esoteric math-related subjects in an accessible way.

Math is a way of perceiving the world. It is as much a creative endeavor as is art and the reason for learning it is the same as for learning art – to enrich the experience of the learner.

The best way of getting students to see math in this way is through the use of recreational math problems, whose solution brings one closer to experiencing math as a mathematician does than the usual drudgery that students are subject to.

I could go on for some time on this subject, because it is quite dear to my heart, but it will have to wait for a more appropriate time.

@LostInParadise

First off, love the name/icon relationship.

Second LOVE your approach to math. My father took the soul out of math. When we were learning math he used flash cards and if we couldn’t answer in a 1/2 sec. we didn’t know it. He tried to teach us how to solve equations like 2x= 4 using calculous, you know run before you can walk. It really turned me off.

algebra

because at some point we had to learn all these formulas by heart, and even though I was generally good in maths, I could never memorise stuff. So I gave up.

It’s funny. Even though math is my least favorite subject, over last summer I got stuck tutoring elementary-level kids in the subject for a summer camp sort of program. But what made it even more of a challenege was that interns were required to tie world culture (and food, in the case of my particular team) into our lessons as well.

We had to be really creative in the way we approached kids with the theorums and formulas involved with math. For example, every day of the week Mon. through Fri. the kids “traveled” to a new continent, and so when we went to Asia on Tuesdays (with the younger kids, I think) my partner and I decided to do a Japanese tea ceremony. Me and my partner dressed up in kimonos she’d gotten from her father’s trip to Japan (the kids loved that) and we set up a mock-ceremony with real tea and everything, had the kids participate and then when we were done we gave them a worksheet with a drawing of the mat layout they used and as a class figured out perimeters and total areas of certain parts of the layout—and then gave them fortune cookies, which they loved. In the end, they were able to recognize common shapes and patterns used in something as “cool” to them as a Japanese tea ceremony and how math factors into that to create a sense of harmony and unity in the ceremony.

When kids see that math is not just about “math” they suddenly are in love with the subject because it relates to things outside of itself. (But some people just love math in itself; it’s just that most people don’t, for whatever reason.) Funnily enough, I think the same thing happens to many adults. I can’t stand learning math for the sake of math, but when I can use it in a real-world application rather than a textbook problem that was given to me—like calculating sq. footage in a floor plan I must design (since I’m studying interior design)—then I can see beyond the theorums and equations and recognize it as a useful tool. (But AutoCAD has a sq. footage calculator built in, so I don’t really have to do the math myself. :P)

Math.

It never seemed all that interesting to me. The fact that it has specific structures and isn’t exactly open to interpretation made it boring.

Math..?
Because it sucked.
Well, you use Math everyday.
But, I never really liked Math anyway.
I prefer reading.